I made a website to make my job easier
Any excuse to start programming
As a research scientist studying for my PhD, I have to read tons of research papers to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the field.
The advent of preprints (research papers published online without having been published by a journal e.g. BioRXiv) means that research papers are being churned out faster than ever before.
I enjoy reading papers as part of my job, but the way some journals format their articles (or how some authors format their preprints) can make the experience quite tedious and makes it much less enjoyable for the reader.
My main gripe is that the figures are often placed far from their reference in the text, or worse . . . Placed at the end of the document!
To get a more objective view of the situation, I downloaded 100 papers from BioRXiv and determined what page contained the first reference to figure 1 and how many pages away from the figure it actually was.
On average, the first figure is 10–13 pages away from the first in-text reference!
